Winery spending $300 million on expansion in Lodi

LODI - There's more than the usual fall-harvest buzz at Trinchero Family Estate's Westside winery.

Reed Fujii

LODI - There's more than the usual fall-harvest buzz at Trinchero Family Estate's Westside winery.

Besides the flow of trucks delivering gondolas full of grapes to be crushed and fermented into wine, there are hundreds of construction workers on site raising a massive new bottling plant and distribution center.

Visible to thousands of motorists passing daily on Interstate 5, just north of Turner Road, the building towers over the surrounding farmland, its floor-to-ceiling interior height of 85 feet able to accommodate pallet racks eight layers high.

The $180 million building project - along with an ongoing $120 million expansion of the facility's winemaking capacity - is a major commitment for Trinchero, but it makes sense, given that most of its wine comes from grapes grown in Lodi and the surrounding region, said Robert Torres, Trinchero's senior vice president of operations.

"This is where we need to be," he said last week while touring the building site. "Napa is our home. This is our second home."

St. Helena-based Trinchero - ranked the fourth-largest U.S. wine company in 2012 with estimated case sales of 18 million - used to ferment, bottle and distribute all its wine in Napa County. It started the Westside facility in 1999 but had only installed a number of storage tanks when an oversupply of grapes and wine, as well as the uncertainty and recession following 9/11, led Trinchero to put its expansion plans on hold.

That created a situation where fruit from Lodi was trucked to Napa, and much of the resulting wine was trucked back to Lodi for storage. Then, when it came time for bottling, the trucks would carry the wine back to Napa.

Even after starting to make wine at the Westside facility in 2011, Torres said, "There was all this inefficient truck traffic."

Setting up base in Lodi will eliminate those inefficiencies, streamline and modernize Trinchero's bottling and distribution operations, and give it better access to the winegrapes it needs to fill growing demand.

"It's fantastic," he said from his Lodi offices. "It shows how much they value this region."

And that is true for other leading wineries as well.

"When you look at Trinchero now moving into this region, the majority of the major wine companies are all within a 30- to 45-minute radius of Lodi and the region," King said.

Perhaps it's not surprising then that the Lodi grape-growing region leads California in production of the leading varietal grapes, including cabernet sauvignon, chardonnay, merlot, pinot gris and zinfandel.

"It really speaks to the part that the Lodi plays in the California wine industry," King said.

Torres said there is a prime contractor and 10 subcontractors employing about 150 construction workers for the bottling and distribution project on any given day. He expects to employ as many as 1,000 over the course of construction.

"The big push right now is to get everything weatherized," he said last week while touring the work site. That will allow interior work to continue during the coming rainy season. And it is needed to hit the longer goal of starting the warehouse and bottling operations by August 2015.

The bottling facility will have four separate production lines, which along with the warehousing operation will employ up to 200 workers per shift.

Bottled wine will be automatically placed into cardboard cases, stacked on pallets, then sent to an automated warehouse rack system, to be designed and installed by Power Automation Systems of Lathrop.

In about 320,000 square feet of floor space, the automated system will be able to handle as many as 30 million cases a year, Torres said. A conventional warehouse would occupy more than three times that space.

Without a forklift or individual human intervention, automated carts moving on rails and elevators will carry the wine pallets to one of more than 70,000 locations in the computerized rack system. Pallets will be fetched as they are needed, taking the oldest stock first to protect the freshness.

Also to protect freshness, the room will be kept at a chill 55 degrees. That's especially important for wines packed in Tetra Pak or plastic PET bottles.